18

Marco Ragni, Ilir Kola, and Phil Johnson-Laird have just published a meta-analysis of 50 years of research into the selection task, a paradigm invented to test how reasoners select evidence to test hypotheses. Download the paper here, and read the abstract:

19

Most theories of reasoning assume that human reasoning ability is stable over time, but few studies have investigated the matter. We analyzed a study in which 20 participants drew their own conclusions to the 64 sorts of syllogisms on two occasions separated by roughly a week.

10

Christina Quelhas and Phil Johnson-Laird published a recent paper in QJEP on how disjunctive assertions are modulated by the contents of their clauses. You can read the paper here, and the abstract is below.

21

Paulo Legrenzi and Phil Johnson-Laird wrote an obituary for their close friend and colleague, Vittorio Girotto. The obituary will be published in Thinking & Reasoning soon, but we have included a preprint here for those interested.

30

Vittorio Girotto, along with his colleagues Laura Fontanari, Michel Gonzalez, Giorgio Vallortigara, and Agnès Blaye, have a new paper in Cognition that shows that children below the age of 5 have difficulty forming probabilistic expectations. You can download the paper here.

About the lab

The Mental Models and Reasoning website reports studies of the strengths and failures of human reasoning. We focus on basic research and experimental data, as well as on developing computational models of higher-level cognitive processes.